


Interlude: And No Net Ensnares Me

by tothewillofthepeople



Series: Witchboy [7]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Curses, F/F, First Kiss, Fluff, Mutual Pining, Pining, Prophetic Visions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-09
Updated: 2020-04-09
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:02:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23555764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tothewillofthepeople/pseuds/tothewillofthepeople
Summary: She needs to find Éponine. But first, she needs to go home.
Relationships: Cosette Fauchelevent/Éponine Thénardier
Series: Witchboy [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/271162
Comments: 60
Kudos: 266





	Interlude: And No Net Ensnares Me

**Author's Note:**

> title from jane eyre: "i am no bird; and no net ensnares me."
> 
> hello, friends, it has been an awfully long time. i humbly have here for you a small interlude, which i very much hope you'll enjoy. as ever, interludes are small pieces of the larger story. i promise everything will be slotting into place soon.

Cosette is on a train.

Her little valise is between her feet on the ground; she keeps one hand on it, possessive. There are very few things whose loss she would regret—she’s not one for hoarding treasures or being sentimental about her possessions—but she has a packet of letters at the bottom of her suitcase which have become very dear to her, so she is warier than usual of misplacing them.

There’s only one other person in the compartment, a sullen girl with short black hair, lots of eyeliner, and a large pair of headphones. She’s wearing what looks like a man’s white button-down. Far too big for her, rolled up over her elbows. She hasn’t said a word to Cosette since they both sat down, but that suits Cosette well.

Cosette tucks a short strand of hair behind her ear and checks her wrist to make sure the neat black words are still legible. _You never know what illnesses people carry aboard trains with them,_ she can almost hear her father saying. _A few spells for health never go amiss._

She sighs. She almost wishes her father were here. But he is on a different train, speeding in the opposite direction. If two trains leave the station at the same time, with one going 320 km/hr and the other going 300 km/hr, and the sun is up and the sky is blue and Cosette feels like her heart is tired, which one will reach its destination first?

Math was never her strong suit.

There is a man sitting across from her. “Can I ask what your final destination is?” he asks.

His eyes are two different colors. He speaks like he’s been cursed, and Cosette would know. “I’m going to Paris,” she says.

“That is where I am going as well.”

“Eight words?” Cosette asks. “Is that it?” He looks at her, dumbfounded.

“I don’t understand how you could have known,” he manages.

She shakes her head. “I’m sensitive to that sort of thing.”

“Is there any way I can help you?”

“You’re a hallucination,” she says, slightly tired. “But I think I’ll be meeting you soon.”

The boy blinks his two-tone eyes at her. Then he disappears. Cosette is alone in the compartment with the bright red seats and the window, beyond which the landscape is rushing like a river. Like a river. Like a river that will carry her to the ocean and let her drown.

*

She learned early to keep her hallucinations to herself. Commenting on them offhand only made teachers and doctors upset. 

“People don’t quite understand it,” her father had tried to explain to her. “And when adults don’t understand things they become afraid of them.”

“It’s not so different from other types of magic,” Cosette said, troubled. She didn’t like the way that her teacher had stopped calling on her in class.

“I know, sweetheart,” her father said. “But this is something that only you can see, so it’s very unique. You need to keep it between you and me. Do you understand?”

*

Cosette steps outside the station and takes a deep breath. Back in Paris, after all these years. It’s a dizzying homecoming.

She needs to find Éponine. But first, she needs to go home.

There’s a house on Rue Plumet to which Cosette still has the key—or, well, she has a key, and the key will work, because Cosette’s father was obsessed with locking and unlocking. Cosette has one single key that undoes every doorway behind which she ever lived, handmade and expertly spelled. She wears it on a necklace around her throat.

The Rue Plumet house is quiet and clean. She sets down her suitcase in the pale blue bedroom and opens the windows. No one has been inside for a very long time. She can almost see herself, fourteen and petulant, leaning over the windowsill to look at the street.

She sits down at the desk in the corner and opens the little drawers until she finds a stack of small blue squares of paper. Then she sets to work.

At the center of the first square she writes _Éponine Thénardier._ And then _Azelma_ on the second square, and then _Gavroche._ She doesn’t remember the names of the two littlest boys, but she has to hope that at least one of the eldest three Thénardiers will still be in the city.

Once the names are written she inks a few careful symbols on the edges of the blue paper. Then, working carefully and humming to herself as she goes, she folds each one into a paper crane.

*

Cosette grew up moving. 

Her father was attentive and lovely. But he had a job that drew him across France every few years, and an itch under his skin that made it difficult to settle. He was Cosette’s favorite teacher, since her others changed so often.

She didn’t have much magic. Certainly not as much as him. But she could make things fly, keep things fresh, help things grow. She could change the color of her walls to suit her mood, or push away attention from strangers when she walked down the street.

And she always had her visions.

*

She stays on the balcony long after the cranes have flown away. When she comes back inside, a man with short gold hair is standing in front of her bookshelf. He’s tall, thin. He wears a single gold ring. His eyes dart from spine to spine as though he’s looking for one book in particular.

“Who are you?” Cosette asks, even though she knows it’s futile to ask.

He turns to look at her. “You have to give the book to Pontmercy,” he says.

“Which book?” She reaches a hand out, like she could hold him in place. “Who is Pontmercy?”

“You have to give him the book,” the man instructs again, and then he’s gone, like all the others, ephemeral as a soap bubble, even though he had looked so real.

She spends the rest of the night skimming through the books on her shelf, wishing her apparition could have given just a little more direction.

At dawn, just when the apartment on Rue Plumet is flooded with early orange sunlight, she finds a gold ring on the pages of an old spellbook, only visible when the pages are fanned out. Like a fore-edge painting, but barely a glimmer.

Part one of her mystery: solved.

She falls asleep in her father’s large bed.

*

They had returned to Paris often throughout Cosette’s childhood. It was unequivocally her favorite place to stay. The house was spacious and airy and full of sunlight, and the kitchen was large enough for her father, who would happily spend hours chopping vegetables and kneading dough and frying various things in oil. As a child she was always content to play in the garden, well within view of the kitchen window.

As a teenager, she was less content.

*

The knock on the door comes late in the day. Cosette sits straight up in the bed, disoriented and sleepy. The sheets are fresh, despite having been untouched for four years—the result of her father’s carefully embroidered symbols on their corners. Just as she begins to think that the knock was imagined, a dream or a memory, it comes again.

She rolls out of bed and runs downstairs. There are so few people who have this address, and she would really be excited to see any of them, but she’s certainly hoping that it’s—

“Éponine!”

As soon as the door is open Cosette flings herself into the other girl’s arms. A moment later, she remembers herself and pulls back, red-faced, smiling. “It’s good to see you.”

Éponine is laughing. Her familiar face is like glass; sharp and clear and lovely. But her black hair is longer now, and the bones of her wrists are bird-like and delicate.

Cosette can remember Éponine when she was small, round-faced, dark-haired and dark-eyed. Pretty in a girlish way. Violet dresses, lavender sparks on her fingertips. The rough burn of her magic on the back of Cosette’s neck.

At fourteen she was brighter and darker at the same time. Wild and almost always angry. Bitter and beautiful, wearing black eyeliner like she thought it would make her look older. Cosette had found her intoxicating then, back before she knew what that even meant.

There’s none of that bitterness now. “I came as soon as I heard you were in the city.”

“Did you not get my message?”

“I didn’t.” A smile is spread across Éponine’s face. It’s like the dark horizon opposite a sunset. “Azelma thought she saw you on the train. I came by just to check.”

Cosette has to laugh, delighted. She hadn’t even recognized the younger Thénardier sister. “She should have said something to me!”

“She wasn’t sure.” Éponine reaches a hand up, almost hesitant. “You cut your hair.”

“I did.” It’s boyish and short now, rail-straight as ever, almost pale gold in the sunlight. “I tried dying the ends and it was a complete disaster. There was no saving it. I had to salt the earth and move on.”

“It suits you.”

Cosette’s face feels like a sunrise. “I like your braid,” she manages. It looks loose and soft and some black tendrils of hair are framing Éponine’s face as if she’s a painting. Éponine smiles and glances down at her feet.

What is poor Cosette meant to do with herself?

Distraction comes in the form of her own paper crane, drifting along the street, pulled like a toy upon a cord towards Éponine. Cosette reaches a hand out for it before it can become a bother—her cranes are persistent. “Poor thing,” she says. “It was probably chasing you around all day.” Éponine holds her hand out for the crane. After a pause, Cosette gives it to her. She supposes it does belong to Éponine now, in some way.

“You could have called me, you know.” Éponine says. She doesn’t unfold the crane, just holds it carefully in her palm.

Cosette shakes her head. “I broke my phone a year ago. All of my contacts, gone, just like that. And you’re not necessarily an easy person to track down.”

Éponine smiles. “Can’t argue with that.”

They both fall silent again, awkward and unsure. Cosette steels herself and takes a step back into the house. “Come inside, won’t you? It’s hot in the sunlight.”

Éponine hesitates for a moment—a moment which Cosette spends with her heart in her throat. Then she nods and follows Cosette through the door, shivering as the house’s magic settles over her.

None of it will hurt her. Simple spells for warding, for staying cool in the summer heat. But Éponine is sensitive enough to have gooseflesh on the back of her neck from the sensation. Cosette has to stop herself from staring.

She’s _so_ doomed.

*

The last time Cosette was in Paris, she was fourteen. Her magic was fluctuating at odd times, sometimes in surges, sometimes gone. Visions flickered like movies without enough frames. She was quieter, less inclined to sing as she wandered the garden, more inclined to eye its walls and wonder about how to get out.

The best route was through her window in the dead of night. The first time, she only went to the end of Rue Plumet before she was spooked and went flying home.

After that, she was never so afraid.

Later, it occurred to her that her father must have known. His wards were too sensitive to not register someone leaving the house. But he never tried to stop her.

*

They end up in the kitchen, cool and small and still clean despite the long absence of Cosette and her father. The cupboards are empty but Cosette gets a glass of water for Éponine and brings it to her at the table. 

“What are you doing back in Paris?” Éponine asks. She’s already settled comfortably into one of the dining chairs, drawing one knee up and hooking her arm around it. Cosette sits opposite her, wishing she felt similarly at ease.

“I’ve started seeing people again,” she says. “It’s hard to get them to say anything useful, but they all talked of Paris. I thought it was time to come home.”

“You think of this city as home?”

“Don’t you?”

Éponine thinks about it. “I don’t know.” She shrugs. “I suppose I always tell people I’m from Paris.” She points one finger at her water glass.

Every time she uses magic it flares like sparks pouring off the edge of a saw. Her glass shivers and forms a coating of condensation, reacting to a clear drop in temperature. Cosette notices with surprise that the light lavender hue of her childhood magic has darkened to indigo.

“Speaking of which,” Éponine continues, “is there a reason you’re here by yourself? I thought your father was glued to you.”

Cosette frowns at her. “He usually is,” she says. “We’re…trying something different.”

“Ah.” Éponine runs her finger along the rim of her glass. “So he’s still cursed.”

“Not fully,” Cosette says, brightening some. There has been good news since she last saw Éponine, mixed in with the lingering frustrations. “We managed the break one of them, and the other sort of…faded away on its own. Like a guttering candle.”

“I didn’t know curses could do that.”

“We didn’t either. But it hasn’t troubled him for years now.”

“And the third?”

Cosette shrugs. “That’s what we’re working on. But he wanted to go back down to Toulon, and I hate Toulon, and I kept getting visions about Paris…”

“So here you are.” Éponine pulls her hair out of its braid and begins redoing it, tighter.

“Here I am.”

They fall silent for a moment. Cosette tries not to stare at Éponine’s hair and mostly fails.

It’s so dark. Perfect midnight. Prettier than any night sky that bristles with stars.

“Lucky that you always have your…what do you call them, guests? To guide you,” Éponine comments.

Cosette doesn’t really know how to answer that. “The world wants to talk to me. I just learned how to listen.”

“Most of us aren’t having visions of the future.”

“It’s not the future,” Cosette corrects. “My guests are more like spirits. Vibrations. A little whisper of what they want and how I can help.”

As if on cue, a boy appears in the third chair at the table. Cosette puts her hand out to Éponine to stop her from speaking.

This one is new, one she hasn’t seen before. Black hair, a mass of tattoos, hands covered in rings. His eyes are closed. Not like he’s sleeping, but like a person enjoying the warmth of sunlight.

“Are you seeing someone now?” Éponine asks quietly, tying the end of her braid. Cosette nods.

Sometimes they speak to her. Sometimes they just watch. Cosette has been having visions since she was eight, when a man named Valjean knelt down to her in the snow. One month later, Valjean himself was there, kneeling in the selfsame way. And she had recognized him, and had not been afraid.

“Who are you?” Cosette asks this new stranger. He turns his face to her, but he does not open his eyes. Before she can ask again, he’s gone.

She slumps back in her chair. “Three new strangers in a _week,”_ she complains. “Very strange.”

“Yes, because having visions isn’t strange enough,” Éponine says dryly. She sips her glass of water. “Your eyes look different when you do that.”

This is news to Cosette. “Different how?”

“I don’t know. Brighter.” Éponine wiggles her fingers. “Like you’re seeing into other realms.”

“I don’t know if it’s that, exactly,” Cosette says. She’s never been able to find anyone else who can do what she does. Half-prophet sort of girl, half-formed fortuneteller. She tries not to feel too frustrated. “Like I said. More of a vibration or a suggestion than anything.”

“And you said there are three of them?”

“Three this week. That one,” she says with a nod to the empty chair, “I’ve never seen before. And there was a new one yesterday, too, a tall boy with blond hair. But it’s often a different boy. He’s tall. Black hair, and two-toned eyes. I’ve seen him a few times.”

Something changes in Éponine’s expression. “One brown? One blue? Does he have a lot of freckles?”

“He does!” Cosette sits up straighter in her seat. “Do you know him?”

“I do.”

Cosette can’t believe her luck. She grasps Éponine’s hand, beaming. “Is he in Paris? Can you take me to him? Now?”

“Tell me what you need him for first.”

“I don’t know, exactly.” Cosette says. Her heart is beating so fast. The visions don’t come often. As a child she knew her father was coming before he ever arrived, and so was not afraid when he appeared to take her away from Éponine’s family. The other incidents of hallucinations—visions—hallucinations were drawn out, sparse. But this boy, this stranger, has drifted around her for less than a week. To have him so near, so soon makes her almost dizzy. “I’ll figure it out when I find him. Maybe he can help me.”

“Help you help your father.”

“Well, yes.”

Éponine props her chin on her hand and watches Cosette for a long moment. “I suppose I should have guessed that it was for your father that you finally came back,” she says.

The comment takes a moment to land. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.”

“It sounded like it meant something.”

Éponine is frowning down at the water glass. “You’ve been gone four years,” she says. “You didn’t think I would miss you at all?”

“I did,” Cosette says, confused. “I mean, I missed you too.”

“I just guess I’d hoped you would come back sometime under your own power, not because your father needed you to.”

They both fall silent for a long moment. Cosette feels like she needs to catch her breath, even though she hasn’t left her chair. The sentiment, from proud, prickly Éponine, is unexpected. For that reason, she feels like she needs to take it very seriously.

“It’s been four years since I was in Paris,” she says finally, “and I’ve thought about you every damn day.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Every day. I walked into Rue Plumet yesterday and almost expected to see you climbing through my bedroom window again.”

“I used to walk down Rue Plumet at least once a week,” Éponine says, looking back out the window. “Just to see if the lights were on.”

“I would have told you if I had come back.”

“I know.” Éponine still isn’t looking at her. “I just wanted to make sure.”

Cosette makes a decision. “Come upstairs with me,” she says. “I want to show you something.”

*

It had been on one of her evening walks at age fourteen that she had found Éponine again.

It was the simplest thing. Two girls on the same corner of the street. A flicker of recognition which turned into open-mouthed staring. Both of them shy and strange, demanding, “What are _you_ doing here?”

Cosette wanted to reach out and check if Éponine was a vision, a guest, a hallucination. But she was real as stone where she stood on the pavement. 

Cosette almost wanted to flee. She didn’t remember Éponine kindly. But Éponine looked so different, so new and yet so familiar. So she stayed.

*

Her little valise is still in the pale blue bedroom. When they enter, Éponine takes a moment to look around, noting every untouched thing, small museum to the girl Cosette was four years ago. “Hasn’t changed much.”

“Papa usually locks the place down with wards when we leave,” Cosette explains, kneeling down beside her valise and unzipping it. “Keeps the spiders out, keeps the pipes from freezing.”

“Keeps anything from changing.”

Cosette keeps her head down, rifling through her clothes. “I think plenty of things have changed.”

“Sure.” Éponine watches her for a moment. “What are you looking for?”

Cosette sits back on her heels. “These.” In her hand, she has a stack of letters.

There aren’t many—maybe ten. The most recent bears a postmark from two years ago. She’s kept them bound with a yellow ribbon. The addresses, in careful red ink, are all directed to _Cosette Fauchelevent._

“You kept my letters.”

Cosette nods. “Every one of them.” She touches her finger to the yellow ribbon. “I had to find spells to put on the paper to keep them from disintegrating. I’ve read them so many times that they split along the creases.”

“I still have yours,” Éponine says. “In a box under my bed. I probably know them all by heart. _Dear Éponine, the moon had your face tonight.”_

“You stopped writing me back.”

“I started to wonder if I’d dreamt you.” Éponine kneels on the floor next to Cosette, finally looking her full in the face. “You kissed me and then you were gone. I didn’t know what to think.”

“I said I was sorry.”

“I know that. I thought you meant that you shouldn’t have done it.”

“That’s not what I meant at all.”

“I know that now.” Éponine reaches out to run her fingers through Cosette’s short corn silk hair. Cosette leans into her hand, smiling.

“I would have come back sooner if I could have,” she says. “When you stopped writing me back, I was afraid you wouldn’t want to see me.”

Éponine laughs and shakes her head. “I think I wanted to see you too much.”

“And you’re right,” Cosette says. “I’m still learning how to do things on my own, and not just follow my father wherever he goes. I knew I had to come here. I knew I didn’t want to go to Toulon. It wasn’t just for him that I came back.”

“I know.”

“Then kiss me, please,” Cosette says, leaning in. “I won’t be able to bear it if you don’t kiss me.”

Éponine does.

It feels more like coming home than anything has.

*

Their first kiss at fourteen was in the blue bedroom in Rue Plumet. Cosette snuck her in after months of evenings spent together walking by the river or watching the sparkling Eiffel Tower, riding the métro too late and laughing together down every sidewalk.

Having Éponine in her room had felt different. More tender, more careful. They kept their heads bent together, staying quiet so Cosette’s father wouldn’t hear. 

At the end of the night, Éponine had gone to climb back out the window. But she paused on the sill, looking back, and Cosette kissed her there.

For years she considered it the bravest thing she had ever done.

*

They get lost in each other, spend hours in Cosette’s little bed kissing more and laughing and telling small stories about the years they’ve missed. Cosette is alive with wonder at being allowed to touch Éponine’s hair, the soft skin of her wrists, the small of her back. Éponine likes to laugh and pull Cosette in by her hair, and Cosette likes that too.

It’s ages before they think of dinner, and ages after that before Cosette remembers to ask again about the boy that Éponine knows, the one from her flickering visions.

“He used to live in my building,” Éponine explains. They’re sitting in the garden now as the sun sets, sharing food from waxy white takeout containers. “Had some sort of bad run-in with his grandfather, so he’s not there anymore, but I think I can find him again. I could even ask around tonight, if you wanted.”

“Tomorrow,” Cosette says, shaking her head. “We’ll take care of it tomorrow. I’m tired and I want tonight to myself.”

“Then you shall have it.” And Éponine smiles at her, her bright new smile, and Cosette can’t do anything but smile back.

**Author's Note:**

> i hope everyone is staying safe and well.
> 
> on tumblr i am [kvothes](https://kvothes.tumblr.com/tagged/x). come let me know what you think!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Interlude: And No Net Ensnares Me by tothewillofthepeople](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23692789) by [TheLordOfLaMancha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLordOfLaMancha/pseuds/TheLordOfLaMancha)




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